


The Final Promise

by the_mumbler



Category: Original Work
Genre: #clean, F/M, Gen, Memories, Original work - Freeform, Sci-Fi, War, clean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23931997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_mumbler/pseuds/the_mumbler
Summary: A granddaughter attempts to give her dying, Alzheimer's afflicted grandmother one last happy memory by infiltrating her mind to gather a series of items strong enough to link to a final thought.
Relationships: grandmother/granddaughter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	The Final Promise

Final Promise

The doctor placed leads on my forehead, sticking white tentacles onto my skin.

“Ok. Remember to find all the pieces related to that memory and do not fall into a glitch. They appear randomly so be careful. If you are successful, we'll bring in your grandmother to see."

He pressed a key on the computer.

“Good luck."

The humming of the machine became distant and I faded into obsidian.

I awoke in a pool of light shining in broken patches upon the cracked stone floor. Shattered stained-glass windows colored dust-covered pews in pastels. Marble columns corrupt with fissures like a thousand miniscule rivers threatened to crumble the supports at the slightest touch. This was once a beautiful cathedral. 

I could see the carved altar where my grandmother and grandfather married. The rotting wood carpeted green by moss reeked of decay. It had aged almost beyond recognition. The altar suddenly glitched, vertical lines of pink and yellow scoring the image until it disappeared then reappeared. Its instability was nearly humid, palpable and heavy like a forgotten purpose. This memory wouldn't last long.

Cautiously, I approached, my footsteps echoing off the arches and ceiling. White roses blinked in and out of existence. This is what I came here for, but I was nervous to grab something that might drag me into a sea of lost thoughts. The roses glitched again and I knocked over the vase, taking the first flower to hit the ground. Toe to heel, I stepped back and watched the altar rapidly flash then disappear forever. It was a close call.

I placed the ivory rose in my bag and took a seat to catch my breath. But I didn't expect the pews to glitch. Iridescence like the swirl of polychrome on oil swallowed me whole. I was dropped into an undertow of cacophonous sound and color. This was not the soft fading into a new, mapped memory, but a fall into the wild unconscious. Tucking my knees to my chest, I braced for whatever was next. 

I opened my eyes to another’s staring back at me. Green and slited, they belonged to an orange, long-haired cat. She purred as she brushed up against my face. I sat up and looked around. The creak of yellow linoleum betrayed my steps, but only to the cat and not the woman cooking at the stove. Her hair was tied in a bun and her beige-spotted brown dress flowed to her knees. The apron was knotted securely against her back. Sizzling eggs fried as she flipped them over. The screen door squeaked open and a man walked in trailing dirt behind him. He washed his hands and the woman brought him a plate of eggs and plain toast.

“Not sure how much we are going to have left of this”, he said as he spread strawberry jam over the slices of toast. “The soil is too dry for strawberries this year, Marj”.

“Well then,” she said, “it looks like you’re going to have to plant some apricot trees instead. They’d sell nicely at the market. Lord knows we need it.”

The farmer sighed and ran his hands through his hair.

“I know you’re doing your best,” the wife said as she twisted her wedding ring “,but it’s been tough with the government rationing everything for the war.”

The ring was exactly like the one grandma wore: a solid gold band with three small diamonds embedded on top. It would be passed down, an heirloom of love, from mother to daughter.

“Alright. I’ll plant some seeds and we’ll sell any extra crops. And train that cat of yours to chase away those mice; we don't need them vermin stealing our corn.”

The wife chuckled. “Yes, dear. I’ll try my best.”

The screen door squeaked again as a young woman walked in holding a curly haired toddler’s hand. 

“Thank you for watching her, Kathleen.” 

“Of course! Martha and I had a lot of fun at the park. There’s a reason I’m her favorite aunt.” 

That little, wide-eyed girl chewing on a lollipop stick was my grandmother. I could have never imagined her so small. To me, Grandma Martha had always been just grandma: wise and old. 

Toddler Martha dropped the lollipop stick and wobbled over to her father’s leg, arms outstretched. She was promptly picked up and given a kiss on the cheek along with a piece of jammed toast. 

I grabbed the littered stick and placed it in my bag. It would serve as a sweet reminder of her early family life. 

The scene before me faded out black and I awoke on a lilac tweed sofa. The transition into this memory was much more pleasant than falling through a glitch, but still I had no idea where I was. The room before me was not part of the charted course. Wood-paneled walls were dappled with amber damask wallpaper. The teal carpet held onyx cat hairs and a litter box near the bookcase. A typewriter sat on an oak desk with an unfinished paper curving over the top like a palm frond lending shade. The front door knob twisted and I jumped as if the young lady could see me. She dropped her keys into the pocket on her pink short-sleeved dress. Her hair curled around the mint ice cream-green collar. There was no mistaking her; this was college Martha. The vibrant, fierce girl who led a women’s march on campus and even, at least according to her, single-handedly vandalized a misogynistic professor’s office. But, today, she didn't look so strong. Red eyes revealed she had been crying as she sniffled and picked up the typewriter. She typed out a letter addressed to her parents through watery eyes and, oddly, the occasional half-smile. I leaned over her shoulder to read. I felt guilty prying into something so clearly personal, but I had to. This was one of Grandma Martha’s most important memories and I had to collect the Essential Item, the one image that would remind her of this time— of herself. So, I read the letter that informed her traditional, working-class parents that their only daughter had been accepted into the Army Nurse Corp to serve wounded soldiers in Vietnam. 

Martha got up to pace around the room, exhaling shaky breaths. 

“You can do this,” She said aloud to herself.

“You want this. You need this. You’re sad to leave, and, quite frankly, a little scared, but this is your way to make a change. You volunteered, for goodness sake! Just do it and be confident, Martha.”

She composed herself and rummaged through her desk for a stamp.

“You can do this,” I echoed as I reached for the letter.

But my hand went right through the paper as if it were a hologram. This was not the Essential Item. I looked around the room and saw the all too familiar sight of scored lines appearing through objects. Everything started glitching at once. The wallpaper disappeared then reappeared and even Martha herself blinked out of existence. I braced myself for the fall.

I tumbled through a deafening gyre of color and fell hard onto the ground. Red, alkaline and salty, seeped around my teeth. I spat out blood from my bitten cheek. 

I looked around and recognized the olive green, vinyl hospital tent outlined by a dense jungle of shadows. A photograph of this very place hung on Grandma’s refrigerator with the inscription, “Loc Ninh, 1963” on the back.

Back on Recollection Road somehow, this was one of the memories, besides the fallen catheredal, hypothesized to materialize during my quest. Recollection Road, as the doctor had called it, was a simple, A to B path of healthy neurons containing strong memories. It was a map to the Final Remembrance, the last memory my grandma would have. But that would only happen if I managed to collect the right items in time.

Soldiers milled through the compound like ants underground. I followed one into the tent marked by a red cross. White beds, about twenty of them, lined each side of the makeshift hospital. IVs creeped like vines over injured men, dripping morphine into their wounded bodies. Some were tiger-striped by gashes while others lay unconscious, half-mummified by gauze around their heads. 

Nurse Martha, dressed in a starch-white, skirted uniform, prepared a vial of antibiotics for a soldier missing his left foot. He groaned and twisted in pain, now unafraid to shed tears. 

“Try to hold still, please,” She said as she injected the medicine.

“Can’t you give me more morphine?” the soldier said through gritted teeth.

“Not until Sergeant Thompson gets here to take your report.”

Martha cleaned the burns on his arms with a damp towel then wrapped them up as the Sergeant finally walked in.

“Corporal Robins, I’m glad to see you alive.” The Sergeant’s gaze drifted the corporal’s missing foot.

Robins looked away in shame. “Can't say I agree, Sir.”

“Your fellow soldiers have lost much more than a boot, Robins. I’d say you're lucky. I promise Nurse Martha here will make you much more comfortable soon, but now I need to know what happened.”

“We were radioed about a Vietcong encampment in the Northeast jungle. I led the squad in hopes of finding and disbanding the enemy group, but we were ambushed.”

He shook his head.

“I gave away our position when I stepped on a landmine. The blast blew me yards away and… and that's all I remember, Sir.”

The Sergeant let out a frustrated sigh. 

“Your battalion is missing, Corporal.”

“What? You can't radio them? Send a search party!”

“We can't risk more men being attacked. We are losing too many as it is.”

“We were hoping you might have seen something or have ordered your troop to retreat someplace,” Martha said.

“I wish I did, Ma’am.” Robins said. 

“They’ve been captured.” Sergeant Thomas said with dismay.

“I suppose I am the lucky one afterall.” Robins said.

The Sergeant nodded and Martha pushed in the rest of the morphine as the soldier fell asleep.

Grandma never talked too much about her time in Vietnam and looking at the tears in her eyes now I can see why.

The hours went on like this as Nurse Martha tended to a growing amount of wounded soldiers, many with missing limbs and burnt faces. Through it all she kept a journal detailing each patient’s name, affliction, and odds of survivability. It was grim, but necessary. No doubt, this was the Essential Item.

She sat at the edge of the bed as the patient, riddled with bullet holes more numerous than the pores in a stony coral, did not stir. She wrote down the date of his death and placed the notebook on the table. I reached for it, but the ground heaved upward and threw me against the tent siding as the makeshift hospital was set ablaze by a RPG. 

The vinyl tarp melted quickly as Martha wheeled out as many soldiers as she could. Still, she wasn't fast enough to stop the ceiling from falling on Corporal Robins. The sizzling, half-melted plastic landed on his injured leg and face. The temperature grew hotter as Martha dragged him outside. Like a tsunami of fire, the tent and memory collapsed as I grabbed the journal and closed my eyes. The last image I held in my mind was of my grandma carrying the wounded soldier, before unremarkable, now disfigured into familiarity as a man missing his left leg and right eye, a man who would become my grandfather.

A final missile hit the tent and a wave of black overtook me. White light blanched through the dark as I readjusted to a new memory, one distantly recognizable to me. 

My grandma, now in her mid-60s, sat in a cheap wooden chair next to a bed with perfectly laid blankets over her sleeping husband. The sage walls and gold curtains tried to make the room feel like home, but only succeeded in emanating a surreal atmosphere. The fake succulent covered in dust shared the nightstand with multiple pill bottles and a blood-pressure cuff. A bright red AED kit hung on the wall.

My grandpa, weak and polluted with cancer, stirred and took a ragged breath. He looked over to his crying wife of 43 years.

“How can I carry on without you?” She asked through tears.

“As I remember it, you were the one carrying me.” He took her hand. “My dear, you have more courage than anyone I know. You are the greatest mother and grandmother. You have been the best wife to me. Know that I love you and always will.”

“Just promise me one thing,” He said, “Never forget me. Always remember the good times we had.”

“I promise.” She said as she squeezed his frail hand.

The scene changed to his funeral as relatives, dressed in black, congregated around his casket like vultures. Prayers and wails were heard throughout the crowd as friends gave speeches about my grandfather’s life. Through it all, my grandma stood proud and teary-eyed. What I couldn't do when I was nine, here at my first funeral, I did now. I followed my grandmother back to her room when everyone was downstairs at her house. There she broke down. She sobbed in anguish and wept bitterly then wiped her eyes and went downstairs with a brave face.

She left a red rose on her nightstand with my grandfather’s wedding ring hung on the stem. I slid the gold band off the flower and solemnly added it to my bag. My mission was complete.

I awoke to the squeak of sneakers and monotone beeping of the heart rate monitor as a nurse peeled off the leads from my head. I felt like I had run up a mountain despite sleeping for the last six hours. 

“Drink this. It'll help increase your electrolytes.”

The doctor handed me lime Gatorade with a smile as if I were the star quarterback who just won the Superbowl.

“You've done a fantastic job. The images were crystal clear and we can now assemble the Final Remembrance.”

I looked over at the bed next to me and saw my grandma, somehow paler and more fragile than ever before. She was so strong throughout her life, but to see her now unconscious, intubated, and almost gone was heartbreaking. I could only hope she would be strong enough for one last memory. 

The doctor typed a series of codes on the computer and reattached my leads.

“Thanks to you, the last memory is now reconstructed by the strands of genetic memory in each of the Essential Items. This is it. Close your eyes.”

No more broken pieces lay before me on the floor of the cathedral. The Final Remembrance stood on pillars of uncompromising marble, immoveable. Shattered glass remained fused as one pane to dye sunlight green and blue. Shafts of pastel hues blossomed upon pews filled with people donned in fine attire. Women wore their best dresses, careful to avoid white. The quiet hum of voices echoed with exciting anticipation like a current carving the air. It was a celebratory occasion and the bride had finally arrived. 

I took a seat in the back, next to the oldest guest whose eyes brimmed with tears. Her shaky fingers wiped the soundless diamonds from her puffy cheeks onto her hospital gown as she took my hand.

“Thank you.” 

I had no words to say back. This is the last time I’d see my grandma alive. Alive and whole. 

Happy.

She watched with utter emotion as a younger version of herself walked down the aisle. 

Her groom stood nervously as they faced each other. The priest began to read as the couple repeated his words. 

“I promise to be your loving and faithful husband. I promise to be with you for better or worse, and for richer or poorer.” My grandfather said.

“I promise to be your loving and faithful wife. I promise to be with you in plenty and want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.” She said.

Waterfalls streamed from her eyes as my grandma smiled and echoed her last words:

“I promise”.


End file.
